Just Another Lie
by fiadorable
Summary: Post 2x15 AU. Based off a prompt by freifraufischer on Tumblr: Season 2 Post The Queen is Dead, Regina tries to go to Snow and Charming to say she effed up going with Cora. Author's choice how Snow and Charming react.
1. Chapter 1

He's not speaking to her, hasn't since her vow to kill Cora at Johanna's grave, and his moody silence fills the loft as he washes the dishes from her aborted birthday breakfast. He doesn't know what Cora's like, she tells herself, pulling the white afghan tight around her shoulders as she curls into a ball on the love seat. Cora was long gone by the time Charming wandered into her path, and he hadn't been back in the Enchanted Forest with her and Emma. He doesn't understand.

A loud clank startles her from her reverie.

"Sorry," David mutters, tugging the dishcloth from his shoulder to dry the pan he's just rinsed.

Mary Margaret sighs and lowers her head back to her arm. Some birthday.

Someone knocks on the door, a sharp staccato against the heaviness in the room.

David moves to answer the door, but she stays him with a soft, "I'll get it," and throws off the afghan. He holds up his hands, then braces them on the kitchen counter, watching as she walks to the door. She shifts the bolt and opens the door.

"Regina!"

Speak of the devil and the devil, or the devil's daughter, shall pay you a visit.

A cold fist closes around her chest as she wonders if somehow Regina heard her bold declaration to assassinate her mother and was now calling to claim the vengeance she'd terrorized a kingdom for. But her heart remains in her chest, no clouds of purple magic fill the loft, no fire spills from her step-mothers gloved hands, and so she asks, "What are you doing here?"

She hears clothes rustling as David pulls his gun from the waistband of his jeans, and it's so strange how that sound has become as familiar as the ring of a sword being drawn. He stands behind her, close, but still not touching.

"May I come in?"

"No," David says.

"I wasn't talking to you, Shepherd," Regina sneers.

"You have a lot of nerve coming here after what you did today."

"What my mother did," Regina says, holding up her hand. "I just want to talk. To Mary Margaret."

"There's nothing left to say," Mary Margaret says. "I think you made your choice perfectly clear in the clock tower." She hasn't broken down in tears yet. Doesn't mean she's not going to eventually the longer Regina stands in her doorway. She starts to close the door, though if Regina wants in, there's precious little she can do to stop her.

"Wait," Regina says, her black gloved hand wrapping around the edge of the door.

David steps to the side and raises the gun level with her head. "You're not welcome here."

Regina ignores him, pushes the door open further and steps halfway inside. "What if I chose wrong?"

"Then you'll only have yourself to blame," Mary Margaret says.

Her step-mother's eyes go wide, her mouth drops open, and for a moment she looks decades younger, like the newly crowned queen who'd stood shaking before a broken mirror, like a leaf clinging to a skeletal tree in the grip of winter. Snow wasn't supposed to be up there, had given Johanna the slip once the ceremony was over, eager to see Regina in all her finery one last time, and had cried out when she found Regina hugging herself, crouched on the floor. She'd rushed into the room to see what was the matter, why was her new mother trembling and crying when she'd just married her father, and Regina had stammered out a lie about how her mother had an accident, a magical gift gone wrong involving the now shattered mirror.

And that's all this was, all they'd ever had. Just another lie.

"Unless you're going to kill me," Mary Margaret says, "Get out of my apartment."

Regina closes her mouth, glances at David. He still has the gun aimed at her head, index finger crooked around the trigger. She releases her hold on the door and steps backward over the threshold. "Please," she says. "For Henry's sake."

"Goodbye, Regina," David says, keeping the gun pointed at her as he closes the door in her face and bolts the lock. He lowers the gun, carries it back to the kitchen and sets it on the counter.

Mary Margaret stares at the door. What if Regina had meant what she said? She was angry, always angry, always in pain and looking for someone to blame for it, as she'd told her herself a lifetime ago, but underneath the anger tonight there'd been desperation creasing the corners of her eyes, and maybe if she were a good person, the person her mother wanted her to be, she would've opened the door and invited her in, tried to convince her to join them again.

She's not going to be that person anymore, though, because the only thing she's ever done in the name of goodness is get people killed.

"Don't do it, Snow," David says, his voice soft.

"I'm not doing anything."

"She's lying, trying to get under your skin."

"I know."

"But you still want to go after her."

"I won't," Mary Margaret says. "And I think you should sleep upstairs tonight."

"Mary Margaret-"

"Good night, David."

He's still puttering around in the kitchen when she crawls into bed and turns out the light. Silence returns to the loft, and she sleeps.

* * *

Based off a prompt from freifraufischer on tumblr. Thanks for reading!


	2. Second Star to the Right

Turns out traveling by shadow sail takes a bit longer than traveling via magic bean, so everyone settles in for a few hours rest wherever they can find a comfortable patch of ship on their way back to Storybrooke and the Land Without Magic that's somehow become more home than their home ever was. Mary Margaret leans her forearms on the rail at the head of the ship, wrists crossed, fingers hanging limp from her hands. The wind cuts through her cardigan, slides icy fingers along her scalp. It's a welcome change from Neverland's oppressive humidity, she thinks, even though periodic shivers erupt from her chest and skitter down her limbs.

She'd convinced David to rest his eyes for a few minutes in the crew quarters, left him swaying gently in a hammock sound asleep, and then come above deck for air and space to breathe, space to think. Her mind rocks with the casting of the ship, flits from Emma's magic to David's deception to Regina's confession to—

Footsteps from below deck knock her thoughts off course. She turns, recognizing the cadence of her stride before she appears. "Regina," she calls softly, once she emerges. The older woman pauses for just a moment, shoulders raised mid-roll, and then she's moving again, cracking her neck and turning to face her at the head of the ship, eyebrows raised. "How's Henry?"

Regina deflates a little, seems to shrink at least an inch or so as she walks up the steps to join her. "Sleeping, for now. Emma's with him."

"But he'll be okay?"

"He's been kidnapped, ripped his own heart out, spent an hour in a magically induced coma, and just now almost had his shadow torn from his body. He's going to be a little worse for the wear for a day or two."

"Of course," Mary Margaret says, picking at the wood grain. She glances up at Regina. "And you? How are you doing?"

"I'm alive."

"Good. That's good."

There's an awkward finality to her words, a gap wide enough for Regina to squeeze through and dismiss her and her attempts to connect, but her erstwhile stepmother remains at the bow with her hands resting lightly on the rail, hips pressed to the wall as she leans into the wind. She doesn't shiver in the cold as Mary Margaret does; she tips her head back and allows the wind to sluice through her hair, eyes closed, and it's funny how Regina can look all of nineteen years old, all poise and control hiding the seeds of darkness within, and yet still thirty-three years old, the darkness more apparent through the cracks in her veneer left by time and things said and things unsaid.

"Did you mean it?" Mary Margaret asks, turning so that Regina is in her periphery.

"When?"

"What you said at the tree. With Pan. About having no regrets."

Because I agreed with him. Of the three women lashed to the tree, by all accounts Regina should have had the most regrets. The most lives destroyed in her name (or was it Snow White's name, she wonders, a flicker of a thought extinguishing nearly before it's been formed), the families ripped apart, the murdering and torturing, the ceaseless tide of revenge and pain. How was it possible this woman had no regrets when she herself had so many?

"I broke free, didn't I?"

"How do you do it?"

"Be specific or silent," Regina snaps, then softens. "Just… say whatever it is that's on your mind."

Mary Margaret clicks her teeth together. "How do you keep your past from eating you alive?"

"Regret is not the same thing as remorse. Pan wasn't all crazy. The former will kill you, eventually, but the latter…"

"I'm sorry," Mary Margaret blurts. "For that night you came to my door. When you asked if you made the wrong decision siding with your mother."

Regina retreats, her hands slipping away from the rail and curling tight at her sides, but Mary Margaret can't stop, not now, not when she's said it aloud for the first time. "It was wrong of me to deny you the second chance I offered earlier. And," she swallows, "It was wrong of me to assume you weren't sincere regarding Henry."

"There is _nothing _I wouldn't do for my son."

"I know."

They stare at one another, silent.

What are you thinking, Regina? What are you seeing in me right now? Am I the girl you saved from a runaway horse, the oblivious, frivolous princess? Or the bandit hiding in hollow trees with holes in my boots and leaves matting my hair? Or maybe I'm not any of those people anymore. Maybe I'm just Mary Margaret, the school teacher who had an affair with a married man, whose family can't help but fall apart and then fall back together, who killed a woman and used her own daughter as the murder weapon.

Whatever it is, Regina breaks the silence first with a sharp shrug and a pointed look over the bow of the ship. "I should have known better," she says, shaking her head.

"No, Regina, I—"

"Mary Margaret, stop. I knew that look the moment you opened the door."

"What look?"

"Someone who's been pushed until they can't see reason anymore."

"And you wouldn't know anything about that," Mary Margaret says, leaning forward on the rail again, tilting her head back to offer a dry smile. They can joke about this now, right?

"Of course not, dear," Regina says, a feral smirk brushing her lips before exhaustion eclipses her face. "Don't live in the past. You'll only ruin your future."

Regina turns away, walks the length of the ship, rotating her wrists every now and then, her attention divided between the brightening horizon, the shadow, and the passengers milling about on the deck. Mary Margaret watches her for a long moment, and then leans over the railing, hands dangling loosely once more, and keeps a weather eye for the harbor.


End file.
